Grandma's Dish

The holiday season has begun, but this year my family gatherings will feel very different with the passing of my grandmother last month. Up until the last few years when her health slowly declined, she was an incredibly capable woman.

My grandma loved to cook and rarely ate out at restaurants because she believed making food at home was tastier, healthier, and more economical. Every time relatives visited her house, she would ask what dish of hers we wanted to eat. One particular dish called mi fen zheng rou (米粉蒸肉) was and still is everyone's favorite. It is steamed pork with rice flour, and Grandma spent most of her adult life perfecting the recipe that even my dad remembers eating it in his childhood.

Coating the marinated meat in the rice flour, one-by-one

I imagine many of the dishes from my grandma's time back then were complicated and required years of experience to get right. Grandma didn't use any recipe books; everything came from her own set of cooking knowledge and skills. Dishes like mi fen zheng rou use simple ingredients, but the process takes more than a day to complete because it is made from scratch. That's the difference between the food on the table that we eat today and that of older generations. Much of what we consume is processed/packaged/frozen foods that saves us time at the cost of health whereas my grandma used natural ingredients for a hearty meal.

Because so much work and time goes into preparing mi fen zheng rou, our family only eats it at Christmas time when 20+ people can enjoy it together. I will cherish that one time I helped Grandma make the dish. And I will cherish her recipe that I fortunately wrote down for a school assignment a month before she passed away. When I attempt to make it this Christmas, I know my grandma will be looking down happy and proud.

The finished dish!

Recipe for Steamed Pork with Rice Flour

1.  Pork:

o   2 pounds of pork belly

o   Trim about 90% of the fat off

o   Cut into one square inch chunks (slice pork perpendicular to the meat lines)

2.  Sauce for marinating – in large bowl:

o   1 tablespoon of soy sauce

o   1 teaspoon of cooking wine

o   ½ teaspoon black pepper powder

o   ½ teaspoon Chinese pepper powder

o   1 teaspoon of sugar

o   Juice one orange

o   Put pork chunks into the sauce

o   You can sprinkle extra Chinese pepper powder over marinated meat to mask raw meat odor

o   Leave covered in refrigerator overnight or for 8 hours

3.  Homemade rice flour:

o   2 cups of uncooked rice on a pan, low heat

o    Add a pinch of salt

o   Stir for 10 minutes until golden-yellow, or until you start smelling the rice

o   Put rice into a blender to make into course powder

4. Coat each piece of marinated pork in the rice flour

5. Skin yams and cut into large pieces

6. In a steamer or rice cooker:

o   Evenly put the first layer of rice covered pork with pieces of yams

o   Drizzle water and cooking oil over layer to make it moist

o   Repeat previous steps for next few layers

7.  Steam for 1 hour to 1 hour 30 minutes